It is in many cases required to remove fatty matter containing hydrophobic esters (especially triglycerides) during the finishing of textiles. Thus, most natural fibres contain some triglyceride in the form of oil, fat or wax that must be removed to obtain good water absorbency properties in the finished textile. Also, oil is in some cases added to textile to act as a lubricant during processing and must later be removed.
Fatty matter is commonly removed from textile by so-called caustic scouring, where the textile is treated with high amounts of alkali and wetting agent and held at a high pH and temperature (usually about 100.degree. C. ).
It is well known to add a lipase to detergent to improve the removal of oily stains from soiled garments (e.g. U.S. Pat. No. 4,810,414). However, D. Aaslyng et al.: Mechanistic Studies of Proteases and Lipases for the Detergent Industry, presented at SCI, Recent Advances in the Detergent Industry, 26-28 Mar. 1990, University of Cambridge, England states that only very little effect of the enzyme is seen after the first wash, and that more than one wash cycle (each consisting of washing, rinsing and drying) is typically required to obtain pronounced effects with lipases.
Such an additional drying step is considered economically prohibitive for textile processing, and the use of lipases for removal of fatty material in the textile industry did therefore not seem economically practicable.
It is the object of this invention to provide an improved method of removing fatty material during textile processing.